Alaska Part 3 (final) The low down on the high up

Alaska in June is actually nice and warm (low 70's).  Usually.

Not always. When the wind blows off the ice it will cut right through you

The coastline of Alaska is one mountain after another. Not hills.  Mountains.  Lots of them.

The two above actually have names. If you've read any of my other blogs, you'll know that there's very little chance I can remember their names. The fact that they have names means that, by Alaskan standards, they're really really big mountains.  This monster is 18,000 feet tall (it's actually Mt Elias - thank God for Google).  Unless it can impress an Alaskan, they don't bother naming them.  They just refer to them by their elevation. Good ole 8,431.  While Mt Elias is only 18,000 feet high (only?) in my opinion, it looks bigger than Mt Everest.

I think. 

I've never seen Everest. But here's were I'm coming from.  Everest is 29,029 feet high, but at the lowest base camp you're already at 18,000 feet before you see it. The way I calculate it - you only see Everest as 11,000 feet tall.  Of, course, at 18,000 feet there's so little oxygen that you will probably also see Elvis is your porter.

Well, you anyway.  There's now way in hell I'm climbing up 18,000 feet just for the view. Lemme know when the tram gets installed and I'll have a go at it. 
Even without knowing what mountain you're looking at, you can get a feel for it's height.

The trick is to remember that  Alaska was covered by ice in the not too distant past. The ice was usually around 4,000 feet deep. Ice carves up and smooths out stone mountains with ease. It takes a while, but in the end the ice always leaves it's mark. Looking at the mountain directly ahead of the foremast, I'd guess it to be about 7,000' tall. 
This is an example of what stone sculpting by ice looks like up close.

Speaking of ice (good segue huh?), I took several hundred pictures of floating ice (they make great slide show screen savers for the computer, but REALLY boring blogs). Floating ice comes from calving glaciers (in this part of Alaska anyway).  They're broken into 5 main categories.

1. Icebergs (height above water over 16 feet)
2. Bergie bits (3 to 16 feet)
3. Growlers (less than 3 feet)
4. Brash ice (even smaller - to be avoided if you're kayaking)
5. Ice cubes (able to fit in bar glasses, never to be avoided)

Actually there are 21 classes of ice. All of them are cold and will wreck your day if you get too close.

This is a growler.  I named it the Usain Bolt.

This is brash ice

This is a Bergie bit.  We named it the Arizona Memorial

This is the Little Mermaid Bergie bit

They make for good perching.

Or sun bathing, if you're so inclined.

All sea ice is best viewed from the deck of a nice, steel, ice-rated ship.  They look pretty placid, but they have a nasty habit of rolling over unexpectedly.

This one is about 20' across.

Where bergs come from is the really spectacular show.

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This is the Sawyer Glacier (at the end of the Tracy Arm fjord).

The ice really is that deep shade of blue.  It's stunning. Close to cobalt. The reason it's so blue is kind of interesting. But to explain it by saying that the O-H bond stretch overtones absorb reds kinda takes the romance and wonder out of it.  In simple terms, when the snow (that builds up, forming the glacier) gets thick enough - it is so heavy that it sqooshes all the bubbles of air out as it forms the ice. If you're wondering why clear ice cubes aren't blue - its because the cubes aren't big enough for you to notice that they are slightly absorbing the reds, hence are slightly blue.
A common myth about glacier ice is that the blue ice is 7 times denser than bar ice (the ship nature guide actually said this).  It's not true. 

The Hubbard Glacier is even bigger than the Sawyer Glacier.

The Hubbard is a monster.  The "snout" (origin of the glacier ice -discovered by Dr Livingston right after he found the source of the Nile) is 76 miles (and 11,000 feet up) away.  Which means, I guess, that the above picture is of the Hubbard's butt.  And it's a BIG butt. The face of the glacier is more than 3 miles wide. Since distances are hard to judge (unless you're on the ship's bridge and can look at the radar display) it was tough to figure out just how tall the ice was. This guy, however, had the means to do it.

This is Stuart Little (no, not the movie animated mouse, voiced by Michael J Fox).  He's the 3rd officer. From the nav bridge, using the radar plot and a sextant (the doodad he's holding) he was able to calculate that the face of the ice was 600' high.  Pretty neat trick (basic trigonometry). I was impressed. Who knew 10th grade math could come in handy?
As I mentioned before, ice is dangerous (ask any Titanic survivor). Surprisingly, it's also quite noisy. The glacier is flowing, albeit slowly (it take 400 years to traverse the length) but it is flowing. As is ambles along it sounds like a thunderstorm.  Loud banging and cracking. No flash, just the thunder. Ever so often, with absolutely no warning, a big chunk will calve off.

     It took me 3 hours of patient waiting (not my strong suit) to get           this shot.

Imagine a 60 story chunk of ice landing on you.  They create big waves. Big enough for a brain addled surfer to attempt to surf.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFKgQwou7ls 
Alaska has 616 named glaciers. Just like the mountains, there are too many to give each one a name - it's estimated there are 100,000 glaciers in Alaska. There are a couple common myths about glaciers worth quelling here.
1. The ice is thousands of years old - nope.
2. The ice is super cold - not so much. It's just ice.
3. All glaciers are "retreating". Someone needs to tell that to the Hubbard.  It's advancing. Most of the others aren't.

This rock was a mile and a half away from the current face of this particular glacier.

Getting around Alaska is much easier if you own one of these babies.

This is a Dehavilland Beaver. Terrific plane, however, they aren't cheap.  I found a 1953 model (completely rebuilt) for $869,000. You can find them for as "little" as $175,000, but if you want the turbine model you have to cough up $1.5M.  The picture below was taken from the upper deck of the Statendam WITHOUT using a telephoto.

    One thing about water landings in a big bay is that you usually            don't have to deal with crosswinds.

Flying in Alaska isn't for the faint of heart.  Or the poorly trained (remember all the mountains I mentioned). This is the weather as we came into Icy Point.

I was scheduled for a flight tour of one of the nearby glaciers that morning.  No way. I'm not the best trained pilot in the world, but I know when to stay on the ground (or water). There's an old pilot saying "It's better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air, than the other way around". Sad to say that just a week later, 9 people were killed on that same tour.

Most of us lower 48's think that Alaska is the land of snow and ice. In truth, there is a huge temperate rain forest near the coast.

On this photo safari, the tour guide carried a large can of bear pepper spray on a harness in the center of his chest (so he wouldn't fumble around looking for it if the need arose).  While you need to be wary of bears, you also need to watch out for these bastards.

These are nettles. I'm glad the guide pointed them out before I discovered them the hard way. I had a close encounter with nettles when I was 11 and I still have the scar on my hand today.
We also came across this extreme plant.

It doesn't look like much, but under the right circumstances it will scare the bejesus out of you.  This is Lycopodium, a moss like plant (more closely related to the fern, but who cares?).  The yellow, dry parts of the plant are rumored to explode (with a loud pop) in bright sunlight. In the early days of photography, Lycopodium powder was used in flash pans (later they switched to magnesium powder).

The stuff is still widely used today for special effects. It's really just tiny, oil-rich, pollen.

Lycopodium demonstration

Lots of the time good photography requires great patience, good light, good equipment, etc. Sometimes the boat just has to be in the right position.

                                  Cool island with an arch

Move a little more left and you get:

                                   Elephant Rock

Most of Alaskan water is deep.  Apparently not all of it.

Alaskan sanitation workers have a sense of humor.

I like to into bars, but not this one

I'm not a smoker, but these were  new one to me (found in a convenience store in Kodiak).

These cigarette extinguishers must be used a lot by fishermen, because there were several different types. Shoulda bought one for a novelty.

Back to the lower 48

                                          

Alaska as seen from a crab pot

These are crab pots stacked and ready for the season. If, like me, you're a fan of "Deadliest Catch" 

- the Discovery Channel's mega hit reality show (now in season 11) about these lunatics

catching crabs in the Bering Sea, then you'll understand why I was thrilled to see these famous boats in Kodiak Harbor.

The Time Bandit is owned and fished by the guy with his arms crossed in the picture above (along with his brother to his right).  Fishing for crabs is an extremely dangerous job. But, if you do it well (and live to sell your catch), you can make a LOT of money.  It's not uncommon for the deckhands to bring home $80,000 for 3 months of very hard work. Keep in mind, it's extremely dangerous work involving manhandling crab pots around pitching decks in 35 foot seas.

I've been hooked on the show for 11 years and I've always been curious as to what the pots look like up close.

solid steel, heavy and unforgiving to the unwary

I also wondered how the crab enter the pot.

Before they dump the pot into the ocean, a crew member climbs into the pot, lays on his back, and attaches a bag of dead fish to the top of the pot for bait.  This is what he hooks the bait bag to (chrome ring). They do it so fast it's hard to see what they actually do.

You'd think that crab would be cheap in Alaska.  After all, lobster in Gloucester is $2 a pound. Guess again.  The crab I saw was $35 a pound, same as everywhere else. The reason is that you aren't allowed to buy crab right off the boat.  It has to go through the big crab processing plant.

Speaking of processing plants, they don't always look like you'd imagine. Take the Star of Kodiak (in "downtown" Kodiak no less), for example.

If you're prone to seasickness, this is the ship for you.

It "floats' in cement. That red truck is driving out of it. The Star of Kodiak has quite an interesting background.  It started life at the end of WW II as the SS Albert M Boe, the last Liberty ship ever built.  In 1954 she was sold into commercial service as a floating fish cannery plant. In 1964, Anchorage Alaska suffered a massive earthquake - the biggest one ever recorded.  A 9.2 monster.  Even though Kodiak is 200 miles away from Anchorage, it got trashed too.  Parts of Kodiak today are 30 feet higher than they were pre-quake. All of the fish processing plants were totally destroyed. The Star of Kodiak was quickly rushed into position and service resumed in a matter of days instead of months. It's owned by the Trident Seafoods Company and can process an astonishing 1.1 M pounds of pollock and 400,000 pounds of cod PER DAY! They must have a world class cleaning crew because it doesn't smell at all. Try sniffing a Red Lobster dumpster and you'll know why I was impressed.